


that season left the world (and then returned)

by Inkjade



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, But What's New There, Fix-It, Foggy is a damsel (briefly), Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Karen is always a badass, Matt is a trainwreck, Minor Violence, Post-Season/Series 02, Snark, and then a badass, ass-grabbing, more story tags and maybe relationship tags to come later, once I figure out what I'm doing here, talking it out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-15 04:37:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9219341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: The gang's forced back together when Foggy is kidnapped/drugged/interrogated because of a client with connections to organized crime.~Featuring~Franklin "Foggy" Nelson as: sassy and slightly high damsel in distressKaren "Badass" Page as: getaway driver, intrepid reporter, and possible napalmer of the delicate bits of people who annoy herMatt "Trainwreck" Murdock as: not-as-lone-as-he-thought vigilante and all around screwupStick as: Stick





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not even going to think of all the other things I'm supposed to be doing right now: just let me wallow in this fandom for a little while longer while I procrastinate please?
> 
> Anyway. No rating/slashtags as this is still in progress and I'm not 100% sure where it's going or how long it will take me to get there, but it's probably worth mentioning that this first chapter in particular contains non-graphic descriptions of torture and drugs. And ass-grabbing, yes yes. 
> 
> ~~  
> The title is from the lyrics to Iron & Wine's The Trapeze Swinger, which is so very worth the listen.

Foggy is having a really shitty day.

“I’m having a really shitty day,” he says, trying the words out. “I’m having a _really_ shitty day. A really shitty _day_. No wait. A really _shitty_ —”

His head falls off. It involves a lot of ringing. No, but there’s a hot throbby starfish clinging to his right cheek now: somebody hit him. Probably Eastwood Dude, who smells like a pack-a-day kind of guy and does actually sound like he spent some time in the Old West gargling rock salt or something. He likes to hit. Foggy, specifically. Though possibly other people as well: he seems to have had plenty of practice. “Ow,” Foggy moans. “Yes, Tombstone, I am a punk and I will make your day, fuck, ow.”

The spot on his neck where they stuck the needle in stings. His face throbs. His left foot burns. Most of the rest of him is kind of floating, though, like he did some really strong molly. “It was only the one time in law school,” he tells Gum Boy sadly. Gum Boy has a high, nervous giggle and chews his Trident like a cow. Foggy would like some gum. Or water: that would be better, maybe. “Did you…did you want something this time, or are we at the hitting for fun part of the—the—fuck, like on TV but it has to do with how you parcel out the time, what the fuck—”

“Regularly scheduled program?” Gum Boy says, and giggles like he just won a Jeopardy round when Foggy nods down into his chest. The blindfold’s starting to slip a little. There’s light, a blurry view of his cheekbone and the side of his nose, some red smeared on it. His tied wrists feel slipperier than they did before.

That’s…probably important?

“I would have made a very mediocre butcher,” he sighs.

“Mr. Nelson,” Eastwood Dude says. “Focus, Mr. Nelson. Same question. Same incentive.”

“Right!” Foggy nods harder. His chin is like a ball bearing rolling around on his breastbone. “Same question! Same answer, i.e., suck some dead wildebeest balls, unclefucker! Okay, I’m ready this time, coach, go.”

The last few times he was incentivized—and he is going to punch anyone who uses that word within his hearing for the rest of his life if he gets out of this clusterfuck—the pain was a fuzzy thing: surprising, but kind of hard to track, and he’d gotten caught up trying to figure out what it was they were doing since his whole lower leg felt vaguely like it was on fire. Either the drugs are wearing off or he’s getting better at focusing, because now he knows exactly where the sharp thing goes in: just under his big toenail and from there all the way up to his fucking knee, it feels like. It’s _way_ more surprising. So is the noise he makes: he seriously hasn’t been able to hit these notes since puberty.

“Woooargh!” he groans, shaking his head. His brain rattles around in there; he can hear it bouncing. “Assault and battery! Coercion! Confession under duress! Your mother was a hamster and your fa—”

Again. His whole body tries to get away without his permission this time, like it’s maybe figured out something he hasn’t. He hits an even higher note. Altar boy, he thinks, but that makes him think of Matt, and he decided just last week over drinks with Karen that he wasn’t going to do that anymore and he decided however many eons ago when he woke up blindfolded and tied to a chair with Smokey the Cowboy breathing in his face about a client that he really really wasn’t going to think about Matt now, because what if they aren’t really after his client? What if it’s Matt they want?

Also, what if Matt shows up?

Also, what if he doesn’t?

What if he finds Foggy dead and Foggy never gets to yell at him for being a stupid angry self-sacrificing lying creepy creeper of a dumbass who kicked all his friends out of his insane life to save them because he thinks martyrs are cool and being alone forever is a valid life choice for a guy who gets injured roughly every twenty hours?

“Ready to talk, Mr. Nelson?” Eastwood Dude says in the sort of genial tone that suggests he can do this all day. Foggy would really rather he didn’t.

“I dunno know why I can’t quit you,” he moans. When his head falls off this time so does his blindfold, and hey: warehouse. Gum Boy looks exactly like he pictured, a skinny kid with an overbite. Eastwood looks like what he is, a guy who tortures and kills people for money. “Well shit,” Foggy says, and then the lights go out.

It takes him a second to realize he’s not unconscious: the lights have actually gone out. There’s some swearing from Eastwood and Gum Boy. Foggy scoots backward on his ass as much as he can, moaning high in his throat—really, he missed out on a stellar career as a soprano—at the bright awful blaze of agony that explodes up from his foot. He shakes his head, strains against the ties at his wrists. There’s a lot of noise happening, yelling and thumping. A howl. Two howls. “Fucking A,” he gasps, and thrashes, and something pops. He cries out in surprise. One of his hands is free. He bats and scratches, and the stuff wrapped around the other one tears. It’s a familiar sound.

“Fucking _duct tape_?” he yelps, and pitches forward. Oh god his feet. Foot? Face. His everything. He’s so high. Fuck. The noises get louder and more frequent and then die down to gasps.

“Come on, kid, we gotta move,” somebody says, another Eastwood-y sort of voice but with less rock salt, and then he’s grabbed from under his arms and hauled up like a fish, pulled back against a very unyielding and hard-breathing chest.

“Nope,” Foggy grits out, and flails in a fish-like way. The warm floaty feeling is bleeding out of his legs, but his head is filled with bees and helium. “Nope, nope, uh-uh, fuck _right_ off.”

“Foggy,” Matt breathes right in his ear.

In his surprise Foggy tries to stand. His foot bursts into a hundred bleeding pieces and he catches a scream in his teeth. That good old church choir pitch, he thinks, and gulps air in a series of sobbing sounds he will probably be embarrassed by later, but for right now who cares, he’s on fire and it’s dark and he is maybe saying all this out loud. Matt makes an unhappy noise and barks out “ _Flare_ , Stick, get him some light,” in a deep weird creepy voice, and there’s a crack and a _fwoosh_ and a purpley sort of glow that illuminates an old dude who looks more like the devil than Matt ever did. He stills in Matt’s grip. Matt brushes a gentle hand over his face and sniffs, very hound-like.

“Motherfucker,” Foggy says weakly.

“Oh god,” Matt says, fingertips tracing the throbby starfish on Foggy’s right cheek. It’s his voice; not the creepy one but his voice like during the week of L1 finals when he did a lot of deep breathing he called meditating but which looked a hell of a lot like very quiet panic attacks. “Oh Jesus. _Foggy_. Hang in there, breathe, you’re okay, you’re okay—”

It’s possible he feels more okay than Matt sounds right this moment. This is weirdly gratifying.

“Kid,” the devil says, holding the purple light-thing under his chin like he’s about to tell them a booger of a ghost story. “They are coming now. If you want to get this moron out of here quit thinking with your damn feelings and haul ass.”

The world flips over. Wait no, that’s him, going over Matt’s shoulder. This is even less comfortable than it looks in movies. “It’s Mr. Miyagi,” he moan-whispers down at Matt’s ass, which—well damn, the bulletproof underwear has a clear upside. Red is kind of Matt’s color. “Hey? Did I say that out loud.”

“Which part,” Matt grunts, and then starts running. Running with Foggy draped over his shoulder. “Hold on,” Matt gasps. There’s really only one thing within reach to hold on _to_ , and that seems—fresh, maybe?—but with the world sliding and hopping everywhere Foggy’s not going to argue. The old man barks out a raspy laugh. Matt makes a startled little squeak but he doesn’t stop running. Good. That’s good.

The air outside hits his face and his bare feet like ice: he twitches. So does Matt, which, crap, maybe he kicked him or something?—oh. He unclenches his hands. “Sorry,” he mumbles into Matt’s back.

“Worry about it later, buddy.”

“Car,” the devil says, and one magically peels around the corner of the building, coming to a jostling halt with tire-squeal drama: Matt shivers. “In, now, go.”

“Foggy! Thank god!” Karen. She sounds like a Valkyrie. “Is he okay?”

“Matt’s fine, Kare Bear! I think? Right Matt? Are you hurt again?”

“For god’s sake,” Matt hisses, and dumps him gently, which how even, through the door the old dude opens into the backseat of Karen’s ancient Volvo onto a bed of old burger wrappers. Foggy stares at the cloth ceiling. His foot feels like a hot water balloon, skin-stretched and throbbing, about to pop and make a mess. Matt slides in and stuffs a very uncomfortable pillow under his head, no wait, that’s Matt’s leg. The old dude hops into the shotgun seat and Karen wrenches the wheel, and they leap forward like the Batman ride at Six Flags. Foggy’s water-balloon-foot whacks against the door handle and he whines like a kicked dog. Matt hauls him up by the armpits again.

“Bend—bend your knee and fold your ankle under your other leg so you don’t hit the door again,” he says, winded. Which, he should be. He just carried two-thirty of Foggy Nelson, and also kicked some Eastwood/Gum Boy ass before that. “We’ll get them out a soon as we’re stationary.”

Get what out?

“Is he _okay_?” Karen growls, and executes some kind of NASCAR-level shit to get them turned around and down a different street. “Matt Murdock, answer me right now! How is he?”

“M’fine, Karen, just gotta—water balloon—thing—”

“He’s hurt,” Matt snaps, sounding like now there might be a few broken ribs hiding under his kickass armor. “But it’s nothing he needs to be in a hospital for. Head back to my apartment, but don’t go straight there. We need to get him treated and then we can figure this out.”

“ _Wrong_ ,” the old dude says. “Get your head on straight, Matty, you can’t go anywhere they’re gonna look, and they’re gonna look up your place just as soon as they regroup, same as they’re gonna look up hers. Turn right up here, girlie.”

“Call me that again and I will _light you on fire_ ,” Karen says in her very best Karen Page Has Your Number voice. “All of you shut up and let me drive, goddammit.”

Foggy thinks that’s a good idea. The bees are swarming. The helium sinks into his knees. Matt’s hand is in his hair, thumb and forefinger rubbing just above his temple in that twitchy tell that Matt has when he’s more than halfway to freaking out. It feels nice. Foggy pats vaguely at a Kevlar kneepad. “So you aren’t hurt then?” he says, because that bit was never quite clear. Matt’s fingers tighten.

“No, Fog,” he says roughly. “All good, buddy.”

“Well _that’s_ a nice change of pace,” Foggy mutters, and floats into a soft, rocking darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Karen Page is a Badass (but we knew that)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit too quick, but my job's starting back up and I am going to spend the next week minimum buried in all things Job, so I figured I'd better get this out there now while I'm thinking of it.

Stick tosses out directions at the last possible minute to turn until Karen hisses a threat involving napalm and testicles: then he chuckles proudly, like she just won a medal, and gives her the next three streets.

If this is the guy Matt was referring to a few months back when he tried, stuttering and clutching his mask like a security blanket, to explain his heightened senses and pile of black belts, Karen has a much better idea of a sudden why she and Matt Murdock were never going to work out. She doesn’t have any experience with ninjas or super-senses, but she knows screwed-up-as-a-child-by-screwed-up-adults all too well, and that is definitely what she’s seeing here.

In the backseat Foggy gasps and mutters in his sleep. Matt breathes hard whenever he does. Outside of that he also mutters, and it takes Karen several moments to realize he’s praying.

“Turn left here,” Stick says easily, and Karen glares at him.

“I told you—”

“Under the parking garage, girl. Aaall the way to the back.” The avuncular tone makes her snarl. Beside her, Stick huffs laughter. She thinks about spitting in his face, but he would probably make her eat one of her own fingers.

“You’ve got a hell of a lot to make up for,” she says instead, low and intense. The low is for Foggy: she managed to wrap her mind around Matt’s hearing range the first time Matt-as-Daredevil showed up on her fire escape to tell her to drop a story because all that was hiding in the subway tunnels were union workers planning a strike, and the company that had fed her that info was using that as a smokescreen for something else. He’d tilted his head when she demanded proof and rattled off half of a conversation happening underground and four blocks away that very minute.

“Yeah, no shit,” the old man sighs. “Okay, park between those trucks and get the shit out of the trunk. Head for the door behind the van. I’ll help Matt get your dumbass friend in.”

Karen parks the car with a little too much force and shuts it off. “Call _him_ that again,” she says.

“And you’ll set my balls on fire: I heard you the first time, kiddo. This one’s got some promise,” he tosses over his shoulder as he unbuckles.

“Leave her the fuck alone, Stick,” Matt says softly. Suddenly it’s not difficult at all to reconcile the sometimes-sweet, often-goofy, occasionally-stupid lawyer who was her crush and one of her best friends with the masked man who punches hard enough to shatter bone and grins while doing it.

“You and your goddamn _feelings_ ,” the old man sighs. “What a waste.”

Karen finds this pretty hypocritical, coming as it does from a guy that apparently wafts in and out of Matt’s life like a confused homing pigeon despite his claims to have much more important things to do.

The door leads to a hallway which leads to a tunnel, which leads to several rooms that are a pleasant surprise, in that they’re furnished and come with a kitchen and bathroom. Karen tries to commit all the turns they took getting here to memory while she props open doors, flicks on lights, and then fluffs cushions on an ancient-looking couch so Matt and Stick can lay Foggy on it gently. “First aid kit?” she snaps, and the old man points toward the bathroom.

It’s more like a mobile hospital. She snatches at gauze and sprays and suture kits and syringes, anything that looks useful, and comes back with her arms full. Then Karen gets her first real look at Foggy and gags. It’s not that bad—she imagined a lot worse in the hours it took her and Matt and Stick to find out where the Marcano family’s hit men had taken him—but it’s bad enough. Foggy’s face is flowering angry red and purple on one side; his eye is puffed shut and his lip is bleeding. There’s a stripe of bruises across his neck up behind both ears like somebody tried to choke him out. His foot is the worst: there are thick, bloody wood slivers sticking out from under his swollen toes. The nail beds have gone black with blood. Matt’s hands hover over this, then over Foggy’s face. There’s a fine trembling in his fingers.

“Oh Foggy,” Karen whispers, and dumps the medical supplies on the coffee table. She’s going to figure out the names of everyone even remotely involved in this and spread them all over the front page, and then she’s going to napalm _their_ balls. She’s going to burn the Marcano organization to ash and salt the earth.

She might need to cry for a few hours first.

“That shit hurts like all hell,” Stick mutters, and yanks out all the slivers at once. Foggy jerks upright and screams, then passes out again. Matt grunts and swings: Stick catches his wrist easily. “No way to do it that doesn’t hurt, kid,” he says, and then saunters into the kitchen to kick up a trash can lid and toss the slivers inside. “You should try to keep that in mind,” he calls over his shoulder.

“Let’s start with his foot,” Matt growls, and Karen picks up the antiseptic.

 

Half an hour later, Matt’s hands are steady and hers are shaking so badly it takes two tries to get the syringe loaded with what Matt assured her is an antibiotic.

Foggy’s foot is wrapped in gauze and tape, his poor mangled toes are splinted, and his bruised face and neck are shiny with ointment. He twitches and mumbles, but he’s out. The last time she saw him he was flush with the success of a big win in court, laughing in the dive bar behind the Bulletin’s office building and bellowing snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan songs at the servers, the heartache they both still felt receding to the corners of his eyes. Foggy’s always been too big for his body. His personality has always extended out beyond his skin to fill whatever room he's in. Now he looks small and pale and sick, and it makes her want to hit something. Karen brushes the hair out of his face.

“Still standing, Nelson,” she murmurs.

“Smokey the cowboy,” Foggy sighs, nuzzling her palm. Even with the mask on, Matt can manage to look confused.

“Do you know what that means?” Karen whispers.

“I think it’s the guy who—” Matt sets his hands on the edge of the sofa for a moment, fingers flat and spread. His jaw knots. “Who was doing most of the work on him. John Cronak. He works for—”

“The Marcano family, yeah. I know. Is that asshole in any shape to talk now?”

Matt’s head turns toward her. The red glass eyes in his mask catch the light and spark. “Are you planning an exposé, Karen?”

She just stares. He shakes his head, a quick, unhappy flick of movement. It’s strange: a familiar gesture when little about him is familiar at the moment. The Matt Murdock she knew, with his serious frowns, his long silences, his frequent smiles but rare laughter, was real, mostly: just incomplete. She is fairly sure of that. She'd known it all along, that he was holding back something big—with Foggy constantly by his side, providing the sharp contrast of his wide-open honesty, it was impossible _not_ to know. She’d always assumed, even at her most infatuated (which let’s face it Page was a lot of the time, she thinks dourly) that she’d collect the missing pieces of him as they learned one another better, as he would with her—that like anyone, Matt just kept back the stuff he didn’t like as much, only he perhaps had a little more of it than most people.

This version of him, though, bloody-knuckled and armed and quivering with edge-of-violence fury, feels as real to her as the Matt that squeezed the breath out of her and choked _I can’t, I can’t do it alone, I don’t want to_ into her shoulder for reasons she didn’t fully understand until he presented her with a paper bag full of secrets and apologies she has yet to accept.

“He’ll probably be drinking through a straw for a few months,” Matt admits warily.

“ _Good_.”

For a second he’s all Daredevil, big knobby fists and bitter, sickle-slice grin under the angular nose of the mask. Then he aims his head toward the couch and his mouth twists into a different shape. He pulls the helmet off, tips his head briefly toward Karen—probably registering the flutter of her pulse, which she can feel in her throat. Matt was always careful to wear his glasses around her, except for a handful of times she now thinks might have been deliberate: if she caught him without them he would reach for them as quickly as he could without making a thing of it. His vulnerable gaze, fixed somewhere near her right shoulder, mixes strangely with the suit, the blood sticky at his jawline and on his hands, the anger shivering in the prominent tendons in his neck. She wonders what her pulse is doing now, and what he reads from that.

“Most people find it disturbing,” he says, and pushes himself up with a soft sound of pain to limp out of the room.

Most people. How many _are_ there that know him when he’s like this? Is there a club?

The shower’s hissing in the bathroom when she realizes Matt might not have meant the confusing duality of the suit and his naked face, or the bald evidence of his complicated relationship with violence, but the fact that he can’t meet her eyes except by accident.

Karen pulls her hair out of its braid and sighs; she sinks down to lean against the couch where she can listen to Foggy breathe. She could cry now. She won't, though.

“You’re an idiot, Murdock,” she breathes, and hopes he can hear it over the water.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Matt is a Trainwreck and Karen is still a Badass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I went and got buried in life things (Job Things, inevitably), and I am about halfway dug out, so this is a bit short. Sorry for the long stretch between updates, lovely people.

The water here is prickly with rust particles: it feels like microshards of glass pelting against his skin. Matt scrubs the sweat out of his hair, fumbles for the soap and grimaces at the gritty-bitter rasp of harsh sulfates in his sinuses. His face feels flushed. There’s a bruise forming on his thigh just above the knee, and another already swollen and hot with blood on his upper arm. A shallow knife wound on his back pulses. The faded scents of oil and stone and blood and sweat permeate every fiber of this place. Probably it was a Chaste bolthole.

Out in the living room Karen is breathing in hitches and sighs, the way she does when she’s trying not to cry. Foggy’s lungs are sluggish with the drug in his system. Stick is moving around, he thinks in one of the bedrooms, or maybe the kitchen. Their sounds grate on his senses, pull him away from the calm he’s trying to enforce in his own breathing.

_Fuck you cowboy I won’t_ , Foggy whispers in his sleep. _Marci get—get him in witsec, Matt, Matty I didn’t I didn’t I swear I won’t tell—_

His hand explodes in a flare of pain and copper. Matt shakes his head, jerks back, and feels the sticky crumble of old tile and plaster around his bleeding knuckles. “Matt?” Karen calls, the alarm in her voice cutting through the haze in his head. He pulls his fist out of the wall, hissing at the grind of tile shards in skin.

“Fine,” he says, but it’s faint around the ache in his throat. She’s turning the doorknob when he can repeat it loud enough for her to catch. “I’m fine, I’ll be out in a minute.”

The knob rattles again. “You’d better be, Matt, one casualty is enough for tonight.”

“I’m _fine_. Give me a minute, Karen.”

A pause. Her unsteady pulse thrums at him from just outside the door. Too harsh. He’s still wearing the Devil in his bones, he can’t turn it off, can’t cool it down, can’t get a full breath—Foggy, they hurt _Foggy_ and he didn’t get there in time, didn’t even know until Karen called his burner, God in Heaven, what is wrong with him? What good is he? He’s going to raze the Marcano family’s operation to the ground for this. He’s going to bleed the streets every night until they’re empty and silent, until not even an echo remains. He presses his forehead to the tile and fumbles after the faucet. “I’m getting out,” he calls, because Karen’s leaning against the bathroom door now, her shirt sliding against it with every motion of her lungs, and he can’t have her anywhere near him until he folds these jagged edges away.

The towel might as well be steel wool, and it smells like mildew and mice. Karen’s still breathing through the door, stubborn as ever. Matt sighs, wraps his hips and opens it. “Let me get dressed,” he mutters, not sure if the heartbeat throbbing against his temples is his or hers. Probably both.

“You’re bleeding,” Karen tells him, unimpressed and unmoving.

“That’s nothing new,” Matt says. It comes out rawer than he intended. Whiny, even. Karen stills. He sidles past her to get away from the too-honest echo and flees into the nearest bedroom, wondering suddenly if Stick or Karen thought to throw his glasses into the duffel while he was suiting up too many hours ago. Stupid wish, stupid and selfish and pointless. There isn’t much she hasn’t seen of him in the last day: his eyes are the least of it, really.

(But they tell secrets, and they can’t steal any in return so he never knows what they’re saying.)

Karen, being Karen, doesn’t give him the space he’s certain he is telegraphing his need for. Instead she follows him in a cloud of faded deodorant and spent adrenaline, watches while he grabs the bag and digs through it until he finds soft sweats and a worn tee that smell like his detergent. Fine. Matt turns away from her and pulls the clothes on, wonders if the catch in her breath and the change in the temperature of her skin is residual attraction or shock at the scars he can feel pulling at his skin every time he bends.

“You’re going to have to deal with this at some point, Matt,” she says finally.

He pauses in the act of dragging on socks and breathes. He isn’t sure what she means: there are too many options to choose from. “I’m aware.”

“I really doubt that.”

The Devil in his bones stretches. “Enlighten me, then, why don’t you.”

Her sigh ghosts through the room, brushes against the back of his neck. “Us, Matt. You’re going to have to deal with us. You know, the people you packed away in bubble wrap while you ran off to save Hell’s Kitchen? The ones you lied to? _Us._ He needs you, Matt. And God knows you need him.”

It’s so like her to leave herself out of the equation. But her pulse is saying something different. He filters it out as best he can, which is not very with her standing right behind him changing the temperature in here. The ache in his throat is mostly gone, but there’s a new, tighter one forming in his chest, made up of her unflinching fury, her weird, blazing bravery—of Foggy’s drugged litany of refusals and insults from the other room.  Matt digs through the duffel again. “I will take care of the Marcano organization,” he says carefully. “And once the case goes to trial they’ll probably decide to lie low, it’s going to be too public for them to pull stunts like this—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it,” Karen snaps. “But fine, play dumb. So long as you realize you’re not fooling anybody, Matt. Not me, not Foggy, and not that old man.” She stomps toward him and snatches up the duffel; startled, Matt stifles the impulse to duck and throw a punch. “Here,” she says, and presses the familiar thin curves of his glasses into his hand. “I assume these are what you’re looking for.”

Something about that is even rawer, like she’s peeled black a flap of his skin. Matt slides his tongue over his teeth, wanting to toss the glasses aside or to shove them onto his face and turn away so she can’t see his. He pulls gently away from the heat of her skin. Karen always saw this much, he thinks: always. She was just too gentle to speak it out loud.

He burned that out of her. Him, and whatever happened to her before Fisk was arrested, whatever put that ragged edge in her voice and the sting of whiskey on her breath some mornings, that tied tight knots in her neck muscles which she used to rub at during early afternoons at the office when she thought nobody was looking.

“Thank you,” Matt murmurs, and slips the glasses on. He is not going to think about the way his shoulders loosen as he does so. Or the way Karen watches him, still and tense, like she can see it happening, and maybe she can. God. Maybe he should just climb back into the suit now and live inside the damned metaphor. “Karen—”

“No,” she says, cutting him off. Just as well, he supposes, as he actually had no idea what he was going to follow that up with.

“No what?”

“Just no,” she sighs. There’s a shift of cloth, the silken drag of her fingers carding through her hair. “No, I won’t be writing about this, at least not until the trial starts and I can write something verifiable. No, I don’t plan to go back to my apartment until we know it’s safe, and I don’t think you should either regardless of how easily you could kick the asses of anybody that came looking for you. No, I don’t know where Sam Marcano found out about Foggy’s client or about Foggy—I didn’t even know his client’s name until I talked with Marci Stahl tonight. No, I don’t really trust you anymore, but no, I don’t…think this is unfixable. If you’re curious. Or willing to try at all.” She steps away, the drag of her clothing horribly loud, though that might be because Matt hasn’t taken a breath since she started speaking. “No, I don’t hate you,” she adds quietly. “No, I mostly don’t have a problem with what you do: I never did. You saved my life at least twice, Matt, and I don’t ever forget that. And no, I don’t think either of us is any safer separate than we were when we were friends with you. That was always kind of a bullshit reason. You don’t need to look any farther than where we’re standing right now for evidence of it.”

It takes him a moment to catch up with her logic: like a dumb kid, he got stuck back on _I don’t hate you_. “That’s, uh, that’s not—”

“Oh _please_.” Karen huffs a stale-coffee sigh with enough force to ruffle his drying hair. “You talked to Fisk. It wasn’t hard for me to find the visitor’s log at Riker’s, Matt. He must have threatened me or Foggy or both of us, right? And you decided to lone-wolf it until the target was moved away from us, didn’t you, except I write for the Bulletin and Foggy’s a good defense attorney, and you’re not the only one in Hell’s Kitchen trying to put bad guys behind bars, so that was never a viable plan, Matt. It wouldn’t have been even if we were both bartenders. Men like Fisk don’t—they don’t _forget_.”

She breathes hard: anger, judging by the skip-beat of her pulse, except there’s a shivery quality to her tensing muscles that he associates with fear. Matt sorts through his own responses, grateful for the glasses. “What did he do to you, Karen? What did I miss?”

Mistake. Just as much of one as the last time he pushed her on this subject. She stiffens audibly and he can sense her retreat before she even starts to move. “You want to play twenty questions, sure, I’m game, but you’ll be playing too. What did that old man do to _you_?”

Matt can hear Stick pause in what sounds like his cataloging of the contents of the kitchen fridge, and he can’t help his flinch. Karen hits as hard as ever when she’s decided to pull the gloves off. “Ante up, Murdock,” she breathes, and stomps out of the bedroom, leaving him mad and breathless and more than a little ashamed of how much he’d underestimated her.

He’d like to hide in here for the rest of the night. He’d like to strip off these soft clothes, pull on the suit, and go punch somebody who deserves to bleed.

He follows her out instead, because Foggy’s breathing is starting to change, and there’s at least one more person in this place who deserves the chance to yell at him if they want it.


End file.
